scarlettina posted an interesting question on her journal the other day, which got me thinking. On KUOW, there was a call-in show asking the question, "When did you realize you were an adult?" Some of the answers sounded pretty interesting, and it made me think.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure I'm not really an adult, but I think I can pinpoint the time when I was no longer a child. When my father passed away, my mother and I were visiting her family in another state. My older brother (who had come home to find my father dead of a heart attack) had called my aunt's house to tell us what had happened, and my mother sort of broke. The part I distinctly remember was sitting downstairs with her, while her sisters and nieces and nephews milled about upstairs, and having to convince her that it was true - she's always been a very practical person, but there was something about this news that she just couldn't handle, and she kept insisting that it wasn't true, that "God wouldn't do that to us." I had to convince her that no, Rich wouldn't have called and told us Dad was gone unless he was - Rich was already an EMT at that point, and the fire department had already come and confirmed what he'd found. The only thing I wanted to do was cry until I couldn't cry anymore and have Mom hold me and tell me everything was going to be all right, but instead I was holding her and telling her we were going to be all right, even though I didn't believe it.

On the more frivolous side, the first time I actually felt like a grown-up was when I was able to make Mom's flour tortillas myself, and have them turn out edible. The fact that I could do something I'd watched my mother do so often, and not screw it up? Hell, that wasn't just being a grown-up, that was being AWESOME.

So, what about you guys? When did you feel like you'd become an adult/stopped being a kid?